


At My Most Beautiful

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirk is haunted by Gary Mitchell's death and has a<br/>strange encounter with his first officer.  Takes place some<br/>months after "Where No Man Has Gone Before."</p>
            </blockquote>





	At My Most Beautiful

  
He wondered if places always looked like this in the  
aftermath of wars.

The centre of the capital city on Epsilon Theta V had a kind  
of manic energy.  They -- this person, that person, whatever  
person -- were rebuilding on the wreckage of the recently-  
ended civil war.  Buildings emerged from bio-construct  
foundations and grew themselves up in a matter of days,  
almost alive.  They were, in their own way, very pretty.    
Shelling had virtually levelled the ugly colonial buildings  
at the city's core, leaving plenty of room to reconstruct.    
This way would be better.  The provisional government was  
already hard at work in its silicon chambers, grown with the  
new crystalline nanotechnology that was brilliantly distinct  
from the bio-structures that made up the rest of the rebuilt  
areas.  Peace had broken out, declared by Starfleet.

Three hundred fifty kilometres above the planet's sea level,  
the USS Enterprise lay slung in a low geosynchronous orbit.    
For three months now the ship had represented Starfleet's  
will to keep the peace, by force if necessary.  At night,  
from the surface, it glittered.  In the city, they were  
calling it the Death Star.

In the suburbs, James Kirk drank coffee and sank deeper into  
his restaurant seat.  He waited for it to get dark.

He liked this place.  This restaurant.  Its interior lights  
were too bright, the colours too vivid.  It was painful and  
synthetic and it kept him awake.  These miles of concrete and  
prefabricated buildings hadn't taken so much damage in the  
war; they could almost have been the commercial wasteland of  
a Terran city.  Some of the old cinder block buildings were  
two hundred years old, from the original colony.

*Gary, I . . .*

Four months since Gary's death.  Four months since he'd  
crushed his friend with a rock.  Kirk had, as of tonight,  
been Captain of the Enterprise for one standard year.  He was  
along, drinking black coffee on a planet whose peace was as  
tentative as his own mood.  He missed his friend.  The coffee  
burned his tongue.

He'd spent the day in government buildings, representing  
Federation interests and otherwise intimidating the locals.    
He didn't like it, but he couldn't see another solution to  
the place's problems.  Gods, so many people had died, some  
of them so horribly . . .

Outside, the fog was rolling in off the flood plains east of  
the city.  There was some trace chemical in the atmosphere  
that turned the moisture a sulphurous yellow.  Kirk knew it  
was a natural phenomenon, but the sight was unhealthy.  He  
was going to have to walk through that mess.  He paid for  
the coffee in cash, a ten-credit coin from his pocket, to  
avoid showing his iridescent military funds-card.  He didn't  
need that kind of attention tonight.  He left.

The fog smelled like cigarette smoke, a smell he just barely  
remembered from the stolen, illegal drags he'd taken as a  
cadet.  The air was wet and made his uniform top cling to  
his skin.  The humidity got in under his civilian jacket  
through the gap between his collar and his neck.  Cold.  He  
walked.

With the Enterprise's shields up, the three or four dozen  
personnel planetside couldn't practically beam back up at  
night.  The crewmen were lodged in barracks near the city's  
centre.  Officers were billeted around the metropolitan area  
in twos and threes.  To reduce the potential damage of a  
terrorist strike, officials said.  Kirk remembered himself as  
a seventeen-year-old midshipman, in the months before he  
first knew Gary.  If he still were one, he could sleep  
tonight in a space with other people, hearing soft or sharp  
breathing, smelling warm bodies.  If he were still enlisted,  
he could die with everyone else if lonely fanatics decided to  
take all of them out at night.  But maybe officer's lives  
were worth more, and had to be protected more intensely.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that this was  
San Francisco.  The fog was right, at least.  The coat was  
close, too, to the one he'd worn at the Academy.  It hadn't  
been that long, really.  Twelve years?  Long enough ago that  
he hadn't been able to imagine his life at thirty-one, or  
even at twenty-five.

If this was San Fran, he'd walk across the Academy campus  
without even glancing at the landmarks.  He'd take the stairs  
rather than the lift to the third floor of the John Glenn  
residence, where Gary's room was.  What time was it?  2300  
hours?  Gary would still be awake.  They'd sit together for  
an hour, and maybe they'd talk, and maybe they wouldn't.    
Gary would provide for him the presence of another human  
being.  By the time Kirk went to bed, he wouldn't be lonely  
anymore.

*miss you*

He missed the young Gary.  The man who'd joined him for a few  
weeks on the Enterprise had been almost a stranger.  He could  
almost understand how the older Gary could have become  
something so alien, a god who killed without remorse.

The commercial streets melted into residential ones.  Street  
lamps were placed farther apart; it was a little darker.

If Gary had been just a warm body for him, Kirk was even more  
of a son of a bitch than he thought.

But it wasn't that, entirely.  Gary had known him for so much  
of his life, he understood things instinctively.  Kirk didn't  
have a friend anymore who could offer him that.  He wondered  
what Gary would say about a Jim Kirk who would rather have an  
embrace than a fuck.

The house Kirk was staying in was old and set back from the  
street behind a thin hedge.  The owners having vanished in  
the war, the place currently belonged to Starfleet.  Kirk had  
been sharing it with Kevin Gardner, his chief of security,  
but Kevin had been rotated back to the Enterprise that  
morning.  Whoever he was living with now, he hadn't met them  
yet.

Inside, it almost wasn't a house at all.  Warring factions  
had stripped away everything remotely valuable or useful;  
this was just an empty space.  White walls, big, old windows,  
strange, polished wood floors.  The rooms looked vaguely  
European-Terran.

The furnishing had been done by a year's worth of Starfleet  
officers who spent precious little time there.  The kitchen  
had a simple food synthesizer and mismatched dishes.  Coffee  
mugs, but no glasses.  Various equipments for use elsewhere  
filled the largest part of the main floor.  Upstairs, Kirk  
knew, there were two bedrooms and a small bathroom with a  
running-water shower.  If no one had disturbed it since he'd  
left that morning, the towels probably still lay in the messy  
little puddles on the floor.  The soap would be dissolving in  
the bottom of the tub.

*I . . .  
I want you to be here with me*

Gary would have made the house into a college spring break  
fantasy.  A couple posters, a little music, some friendly  
strangers he'd have found in a bar.  By this time, they'd  
have converted that mass of technology in the living room  
into furniture.  There'd be something weird, like a  
twentieth-century espresso machine in the corner.  There'd be  
take-out food cartons piled by the door.  There'd be a  
scavenged fridge with beer in it.

Kirk was too tired to even consider such mad ventures in  
great detail.  He found his bedroom at the top of the stairs  
and stripped in the dark.  He found a t-shirt under the  
pillow on his bed to wear with his boxers.

The bedroom, like everything else in the house, was  
ramshackle.  But, with a chair, a bag of clean clothes, and a  
slab of temperfoam on the floor, what he had was better than  
what most rooms in the city featured.  And he had a couple of  
pillows and some miscellaneous bedding that he hadn't really  
sorted, just thrown onto the temperfoam and settled into as a  
kind of nest after the last laundry shift.  If he'd been  
angling for a clubhouse, it would have been fantastic.  Maybe  
in another life.  He lay breathing in the dark and waited to  
sleep.

*how dare you leave me alone, Gary*

The house made the small sounds of a primitive dwelling.    
Very distantly, there was traffic.  In the other bedroom,  
someone shifted, eliciting whispers of protest from the aging  
wood floor.  Kirk's bedroom door made a sharp click; he felt  
the circulating air as it opened.

"Captain?"  It was a whiskey and cigarettes voice, cultured  
almost beyond belief.  His first officer, the Vulcan, Spock.

"Yes?"

"Captain, are you well?"

"Of course, Commander."  Puzzled.

"Very well."  Kirk heard more than saw Spock turn.  In the  
thin particles of light that slipped through the blinds,  
Kirk could just see that his first officer's chest was bare.

*what the hell was that?*

He could hear Spock's feet press softly against the hallway  
flooring.  The door was swinging shut.

"Commander?"  Kirk was shocked to hear his own voice.  Spock's  
movements paused.  He didn't respond.  "Spock."

"Yes, Captain."

Oh gods, what?  "Were you asleep?  Did I wake you coming in?"

"You did not disturb me."

"I --"

"I was reading, Captain.  I was not intending to retire for  
some time."

He didn't know what to say to that.  He wished this man --  
alien? man? (alien?) -- would explain why he'd asked, and not  
stand there like he pull Kirk's grief out of the air and hold  
it out as a solid thing.

Gently, Spock said, "You are broadcasting distress."

"Broadcasting?"

"Telepathically.  My psi-abilities are not remarkable, so I  
was concerned that I could hear you so clearly."

Oh, strange, that there should be something almost like  
compassion in the unemotional voice.  He still didn't know  
what to make of his second-in-command, even after a year of  
their partnership.  It was too easy for him to dismiss the  
Vulcan flatness as an absence of personality.  Only at odd  
moments did he get to look into that hard shell and wonder  
what the other man thought of him in return.  Where this  
kindness had come from.

Spock turned in the dark, and the flash of a street halogen-  
light caught his profile.  There was something there, just  
for a split-second.

//interest concern protectiveness   pity for the young one  
hurting   need to peel away that suffering   how can a man of  
thirty look so young?//

He realized that Spock was older than he looked, his Vulcan  
blood having slowed his aging process to a crawl.  He had to  
be at least half again as old as Kirk.  He might look the  
same when Kirk was an old man.

He said, "I'm alright, I promise.  Just a bad night.  I'll  
try to think more quietly."  He would have said *lonely* if  
it wouldn't have sounded so much like begging.

The dark shape in front of him bowed a little and turned back  
towards the other bedroom.  He'd been right; Spock's torso  
was bare, dark-hair layered over the pale skin.  A body that  
would be so hot if he reached out and stroked it.  Luminous  
beautiful.

"Spock?"

*?*  No words, just the understanding that the other man was  
listening.

"Thanks."

"You are welcome, Captain.  Sleep well."

"You too."

He hadn't turned on a light, had to pick his way back across  
the room to bed.  He curled inside his nest and remembered  
the feeling of a young Gary wrapped around him in a narrow  
dorm bed.  Those fingers rubbing between his legs, gently,  
and his friend's breath on the back of his neck.  Gary  
kissing him gently when he was still an almost-virgin boy.    
The imagined embrace soothed him enough that he could rest  
and not wonder at the Spock-feeling that protected the edges  
of his sleep like psychic armour.

[29 December 1999]


End file.
